Negative Gamer is Changing Its Name to Nukezilla

As of the first of the 1st May 2010 Negative Gamer will no longer go by the name it’s held since its beginning two years ago. As announced in my video blog yesterday, it will instead go by the new name of Nukezilla.

The name comes from a combination of “Nuke” as in “Oh awesome, check out this video of a nuclear bomb going off I found on YouTube” and “zilla” as in “Yeah, mom, I’m just calling you from down-town Tokyo now. Yeah, flight was delayed a bit but… OH GOD WHAT ON GOD’S EARTH IS THAT AAARGH IT’S LIKE A MONSTER FROM THAT UNFAIRLY CRITICISED 1998 MOVIE WITH MATTHEW BRODERICK IN, GODZILLA“.

Negative Gamer is a bit of a rubbish name
Not one day after naming my personal ranty-blog “Negative Gamer” I wondered to myself if it was a good name. It was one of the first names I thought up and I enjoyed its brashness, but was it really the best name for the blog? It pointed out that I’m a gamer, which is good, and a grumpy one at that. But was its bluntness a bit misleading?

Over the past two years the site has gone through a number of dramatic changes, each for the better. We have had dozens upon dozens of contributors, each shaping the narrative. The site has become less about frustration with games and more about frustration with the entire gaming industry. From the publishers, or developers, games and the media; we’ve got annoyed at them all. But we’ve also tried to add, constructively, to the wide-ranging debate about games. With our editorials and reviews we’ve been steadily contributing to the conversation.

But we’ve started to find the limit. Not with the scope of what we write, but with how far the name lets us go. As the well known quote from a prominent videogames journalist goes; ‘You call your site Negative Gamer, you deserve to be ignored on principle.’ Whilst it’s easy to brush such comments off, the journalist did echo a feeling that many who view the site for the first time get, and it undermines what we do.

Change the name, knock down the wall
The big problem with taking away the mental wall of the name is that we’re basically taking away the pen. Before, whatever we wrote fell under the same banner, and that banner made the readers connect what we say to the ideas in the name. Now we have a new name, it’s vital the content stands on its own.

This topic can get very meta very quickly, but the long and short is that by removing the name’s power over the opinion of the work, what we write can speak for itself.

Nukezilla is an awesome name
The new name is top of a list of 60+ ideas we came up with. I happen to think it fits near perfectly with what the site is about. It echoes our past whilst providing a fresh new look for the future. It also doesn’t have the word game or gamer in, which is surprisingly important.

The new name, whist not reflecting any change in the editorial policy, does add some freedom to the writers. Time and time again we have each found something fun, or cool, or exciting, but not posted it on NG because ‘it’s not really negative’. I used to think this was a good thing, but over the past few months (years?) I’ve done something of a u-turn. I thought if we only posted ‘negative’ stuff we would stick in our niche, but if we post other things as well, the niche is still ours, we’re just in other niches too.

Oh god, change is coming, run away!
Whilst we’re changing this ‘I thought I would never change that’ part of the site, we may as well add in some other big changes. So, along with the new name we’ll also be switching to dark text on a lighter background. This is purely to make reading easier for most people, myself included. As with right now, there will be a polarity switch at the bottom for those who sit in dark rooms.

We’ll also be cutting free of the current review structure. We have a fairly extensive guide on how to write reviews to NG’s standards. They used to be there to make sure people wrote about the correct things, but they seem now to be there to limit how people write. We’ve been doing this for years, we know to write openly about the things that will annoy you, the reader, in games. We don’t need the safety net any more. From now onwards our Indie Games reviews will be using the new style, and from the end of the month all other reviews will too.

What’s going to break?
I have plenty of time to plan and prep for this, so things should just switch. The URL will auto redirect. Any back-links will (cunningly) auto update. The RSS will switch automatically, saving you the trouble of resubscribing (there’s going to be a new RSS feed, properly named, but the old one will work fine). We’re going to get a new Twitter feed, Facebook page and Tumblr, but as with the RSS feed, the old ones will carry on working just fine.

Oh, and we’re keeping the logo, because it’s awesome.

So, there you have it. A new name, more content, and you don’t even have to do anything. If you have any questions, technical or otherwise, do feel free to ask.

NUKEZILLA!